Entrepreneurship is hot right now. It’s everywhere. It’s in the news and on TV. Shark Tank is looped all hours of the day. Colleges and universities are adding entrepreneurship courses for students across the liberal arts, and communities are creating centers to teach seemingly anyone how to make their vision a reality. Here’s what you’ve gotta do. Here’s what you’ve gotta have. Here’s who you need around you. It’s very exciting and a liberating time for creatives of all types.

But, even with all of this, no one can tell you what is going to go wrong with your venture. They can prepare you to avoid unforced errors but obviously no one can predict the challenges you and your company specifically will face. And, let’s be honest, focusing on the ugly parts of entrepreneurship doesn’t sell books or TV adds, and tends not to inspire students to chase their dreams. As a result, few are investing in stories and strategies for the grind of iterative survival that for many, if not most, of us is at the heart of the entrepreneurial venture.

As I reflect on my first for-profit startup, I’m amazed at how little actually went right. In fact, it seems almost nothing went right. Some of this was our fault, some of it was out of our control, and some of it was just part of being an entrepreneur. So, with some time and space to reflect, I am left to wonder: how did we make it?

Here is a little color commentary to give some context for my wonderment:

Very early, my partner was delivering a product demo for teachers at a high school where we were hoping to roll out our technology, and two teachers showed up in workout gear looking for the Zumba class. Our product and company were named Zeumo (‘zoo-mo’), and we were trying to help schools more easily and effectively communicate with and engage their students. The teachers left, mumbling their disinterest in our product demo, disappointed there was no Zumba class.

About a year and a half later, Zeumo had pivoted industries into healthcare with the same value proposition: trying to help hospitals more easily and effectively communicate with and engage their physicians. I was doing a product demo for a group of physicians that had taken months to organize when a nurse rolled a cart into the already tight and windowless conference room and asked the physicians to line up to get their flu shots “while you listen to the demo.” My demo was literally going to be coupled with physical pain.

We had made the pivot from education into healthcare on the premise of a partnership with a large healthcare company who loved our product and was trying to figure out how to communicate with their physicians. We worked with them for almost 8 months on a “joint venture” and remained patient but persistent as we tried to codify the “joint” part of that venture with financial, marketing, and legal commitments – all of which were very slow coming presumably due to their massive bureaucracy. As we approached the first roll out in one of their flagship hospitals, they finally delivered a pricing model that had us under water and a marketing “plan” that shifted from rollout out at 160 hospitals to “we will introduce you to a few of our CEOs.” It was pretty clear that they were going to hook us, starve us, and buy our technology for pennies when we ran out of cash – which wasn’t long, and they knew it. So, we (6 of us strong with no healthcare experience and little cash) walked away from one of the largest, most successful healthcare companies in the country. If we were going to die, we weren’t going to die like that.

Another year later, when Zeumo was ultimately acquired by a different healthcare company, there was immediate rub within the new company with its product teams and marketers because they all believed they already had built the same technology as Zeumo. The acquisition apparently made little sense except to the people who had led it, and they were not a part of any of those teams. After some surprisingly complicated sleuthing on my part, much of it sadly with people with little knowledge of either product but resistance to ours, it turned out that the products couldn’t have been more different – the company’s product queried physician performance metrics and Zeumo was a mobile communication platform. But, there was a marketing story for the company’s product that included the idea of communicating those performance metrics with physicians. So, communication. Physicians. It must do the same thing as Zeumo, right?

While ironing that out to try and get a better sense of buy-in from the new company, we were also exploring the opportunities to deliver on the value proposition of our acquisition – rolling out our communication platform for physicians but enriching it with the acquiring company’s research and data assets to deliver targeted content and drive physician utilization. To make another long story short, neither their research nor data were organized or stored in such a way that we could easily or reasonably distribute them through our communication tool. In fact, their sales and membership models, which organized their relationships to buyers, didn’t even support the cross-product concept at the time. So, at this point, the value proposition of our acquisition was deeply in question.

Did I mention that we had built a nice little product that did exactly what it said it would do?

The fact is that the variables involved in a successful venture are vast – some controllable and some not. And, the ideas for products and services we start with are always at least a little, and more likely a lot, wrong. For us, this was as true at the inception of our product as it was at the point of our acquisition.

Figuring out what to do when stuff goes wrong is, at least in my experience, the core to becoming a successful entrepreneur. And, I should note that this is a universal truth from my work as an artist, an organizer, a consultant, and in nonprofit leadership.

So, what do we do when things don’t go our way?

1. Understand why – identify the problem

Marketing

Are we positioned wrong?

Are we talking to the right people?

Is there a competitor we didn’t know about or didn’t understand fully?

Is there a competitor we had no idea would be a competitor?

Is there a competitor for critical financial or other bandwidth for our buyer even if it isn’t a direct product or service competitor?

Messaging

Is our message resonating like we hoped?

Did we have the right audience in mind?

Is it resonating but not driving an urgency to buy?

Is it resonating but running into other hurdles?

Timing

Is there something about our buyer and their business and buying cycles that has hurt our prospects?

Don’t accumulate features just to try and impact sales (or if you do, know that’s what you are doing and start planning to come back and clean it up). A pile of good features doesn’t necessarily create a good solution for your user.

Make sure all members of your team maintain ownership of tweaks in strategy and direction.

Ensure the full range of team perspectives and pressures have voice. Different people (sales, product, engineering) see the world differently and hear feedback differently, which can then drive differing priorities.

Maintain energy and hustle by involving the team in the whole process of iteration so it doesn’t feel like a game of failure-turned-survival but rather a creative reality of your work together.

Execute.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

With users:

Be proactive about product developments, directions, and try to align it with the value they already get from your product.

Seek their feedback (especially those who “get” your product) and recognize/thank them them when they offer valuable insights.

Think in terms of customer service even if that doesn’t traditionally match how you think about your work.

Capture and share small success stories that prove the value proposition despite the challenges you are facing.

In reality, the questions, steps, and processes offered here for when things don’t go your way should just become a part of how you do your business daily. If they do, you will always be ready when things go wrong and won’t have to wonder how you will respond if they do.

​Fathers of sons,While your boys may like to be physical and like to wrestle and fight, please help them understand the concept of touch and of the personal boundaries of others as it relates to touch. Please help them know the difference between consensual play and physical violation – whether that’s with you, your partner, their siblings, their best friends, or strangers. Let them know now that they can say “no” and that they must listen when others say “no”. This isn’t about dating culture, it’s about the right of each of us to possess and protect our own bodies. They can and should start learning this now.

Fathers of daughters,While you dote on your girls, please respect them if they say to “stop” when you playfully pat them on the bottom as they run ahead of you up the stairs, or when you tickle them in fun but it’s clear they are no longer having fun. Teach them and show them now that they are in control of their bodies and that “no means no.” Please help them learn the difference between safe and unsafe touching and remind them that they can and should always tell someone if they don’t feel safe. It doesn’t matter if the one doing the touching says they were playing or was a friend or a family member. If they don’t feel safe, they need to know to tell someone now.

Fathers of sons,Please know your sons are watching how you treat others. They see how you speak to and touch your spouse. They observe how you talk with or about your Mom or Sister or Dad or Brother. They listen when you talk on the phone to people at work. They hear what you say to or about people when you yell at the driver in the car who just cut you off, or comment on the looks of the person crossing the street in front of you. In all of these, they hear the difference when you are speaking to and of a woman versus a man, and they will replicate your gender biases without ever knowing it is happening.

Fathers of daughters,Your daughters will not grow up to be princesses. They will grow up to be women who live in a complex and diverse virtual and physical society. They will work and go to school in and navigate an often cruel and sexist world. Treating them as princesses and crafting a narrative that finding a mate is central to their success, that their hair is their most valuable asset, that their clothes are what make them beautiful will cripple their self-image as they get acne, as their bodies change, start successfully or unsuccessfully dating, or, god forbid, they get sick or have a terrible accident that changes their looks and bodies permanently. You must raise your girls to be strong, bold, independent, and resilient women whose sense of self is in their control and not merely the passive result of a genetic trait or financial privilege.

Fathers of sons,Your boys will not be princes surrounded by admiring legions of women looking to be rescued by love, nor super heroes who will save damsels in distress. Your sons will grow up and get to work for and with women of all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds and should know how to respect them for who and what they are. They need to know that they can have heroes who are women. They need to understand that women and men are different but that that does not mean stronger or weaker, better or worse, deserving of respect or not. When your son is on the playground with a girl, don’t thoughtlessly ask if that’s his girlfriend. Let it just be his friend unless he says otherwise. Positively reinforce and model for him healthy, platonic, inter-gender relationships.

Fathers of daughters,When your daughter is on the playground with a boy, don’t thoughtlessly ask if that’s her boyfriend. Let it just be her friend. You too should model healthy, platonic, inter-gender relationships and not perversely sexualize your young daughter’s budding understanding of her relationships with others. If your daughter kisses another kid or holds hands or even says she loves them, remember that those actions don’t represent mature, adult “understandings” of their meaning. My daughter told us she is “in love” with a boy in her kindergarten class, and when asked what she means by that she says he’s nice to her and they like to play together. Leave it at that! That’s all it is.

Fathers of sons and fathers of daughters,Please help your boys and girls know that the genders are not pitted against each other – that they aren’t “teams” to which they either belong or don’t. Help them understand that gender is meaningless in the face of fairness, personal safety, justice, and love. Help them understand that they should stand for these higher values and defend them at all cost, that they should never be silent in the face of their transgression simply because of someone’s gender. Help them build their identities and their sense of self and others on these bigger values, and surround themselves with people who will protect and promote them too.

As I wrote this, I realized that my distinctions of message were largely arbitrary between fathers-of-sons and fathers-of-daughters, but the various interpretations are important. We must all teach our children to respect their own bodies as well as others’. We must teach them to value this respect so deeply that they can’t help but speak up when they feel violated or when they see or believe others have been violated. We must overwhelm any possible sense of shame or embarrassment or isolation with a powerful sense of self, of justice, and of doing right by themselves and others.

These are merely the musings of a humble and sad and troubled father of three and five year old daughters, who is trying to learn from the tragedies I read about daily and prevent the violation of the women I love; a Dad and Brother and Friend who can’t fathom the actions of these men; the Son of a sexually abused Dad who committed suicide who is scared to death of the prolonged silence of these victims.

There are five key relationships that every creator needs to thrive. While these aren’t always a one-to-one match (i.e. one person, one relationship), they represent key inputs and a continuum of perspectives we all need to support, guide, and grow our creative practice.

1. SupporterOur supporters are the people whose primary investment is in us as people. Their support is unconditional. In other words, they support us whether our creative process, whatever it may be, is deemed successful or not. They keep us working when we have lost faith in ourselves.

2. CollaboratorOur collaborators are those who get into the creative mix with us. This can mean literally getting their hands dirty with us, or diving in to challenge us intellectually. Our collaborators are also creators and their creative process and outcomes are directly tied to our own.

3. Critical FriendOur critical friends are deeply trusted peers. They can also be collaborators, but they often work in parallel, not directly with us. These are the people who see our work and our process most wholly and ask us the most challenging questions that push and refine our work. A critical friend could be a very different thinker or work in a different medium or discipline than we do.

4. PromoterAt some point, our creative output needs to meet a market or a consumer of some sort. Our supporters, collaborators, and critical friends may tell their friends about us. Our promoters tell everyone who will listen. They step up and are bought into our creative output sufficiently to put their own name on it as an endorsement. Promoters can be developed organically, or perhaps even hired, depending on the creative context.

5. Respected Critic/DoubterThis one may be less intuitive, but our critics tap a different motivation than any of the other relationships here. They may even spur spite, indignation, and a desire to prove them wrong. These may seem odd things to want in our creative lives, but they have the potential to make us better creators. So, these are not the critics we dismiss simply because we think they don’t like us. These are people whose doubt of us matters to us in some way. In fact, it can even work if we are our own biggest critic/doubter as long as that motivates us rather than neutralizes our creativity.

​Recently, we have seen a handful of elected officials “step up” and speak their moral truth about the current resident of the White House and the political state of our country. Many of us have celebrated, or at least sighed in relief, as someone (other than John McCain) in the president’s party broke silence and spoke from a place of clarity, honesty, and individuality. We have been relieved and have applauded leaders who we may have never imagined applauding. I listened to Jeff Flake’s powerful speech in its entirety. I actually think I even voted for Bob Corker the second time, but have long since stopped applauding him, and instead have felt betrayed by the disappearance of his candor and individuality – even if I didn’t always agree with his position. The guy I voted for showed back up.

We should all pause, however, as more people step up and lead (by retiring) and thus feel “liberated” to speak their truth.

What are we actually seeing? Eventual honesty? Contextual morality? Conditional leadership? When these men are finally “liberated” from the office we elected them to, from the privilege of leading our country, THEN they are honest?! THEN they will speak truth to power? THEN their morals matter?

Don’t get me wrong, I am glad some people are finally speaking up, but let’s be honest about what it tells us about them, and the offices to which they were elected. Their sense of liberation and their delayed and diluted honesty illustrate a clear lack of integrity as it relates to their elected office. Integrity is “what you do when no one is looking” as the saying goes. Integrity is “the choice between what is convenient and what is right” according to former NFL coach Tony Dungy.

When people speak out only when it is convenient (after they’ve announced retirement, for example), they aren’t leading. They are convenient opportunists, moral relativists, demonstrative of the demise of social, cultural, and moral leadership, (and thus representative democracy) that leaves us with corruption, elitism, nepotism, and the perpetual belief that the ends justify the means (making money, getting elected, etc. is the top priority and will compensate for those other pesky problems like integrity).

We need to step back and observe this behavior, like most anything, through the critical lens of how we would talk about it with our children. Would we tell our children: once you are no longer in Ms. Smith’s math class, or after you win the big game, then you should acknowledge that you or another was cheating? Would we tell them to get elected to class president or to any other leadership position no matter what it takes, even if it compromises their values? That they can just attempt recoup their principles once the position is successfully attained – or when they are done with it? Don’t litter if someone is looking? Help someone who needs it only if someone is looking? Do it for the reward? Do it only if it benefits you?

If this sort of self-centered relativism isn’t what we want to teach our children, we should at least recognize that this is what we are modeling for them and currently applauding as leadership.

If instead we want to teach them integrity, we had better start by modeling it ourselves, and then demand it of our leaders. We should not accept, much less celebrate, eventual, conditional, convenient honesty that suggests integrity was dead all along.

​As a father of two young children and an advocate for and with young people for much of my career, I want to make an impassioned request: stop associating bad behavior by adults with the actions of a child or adolescent.

The petulant child analogy, the “adult daycare” image, or any of the other references to adolescence that try to capture the limited emotional intelligence of the current resident of the White House fundamentally misunderstand and muddle both what it means to be a child and what it means to be an adult. The petulant adult is a different beast from the developing child and we need to treat him as such.

For starters, my child’s daycare while full of petulant children, including my own, is a place of love and growth and inspiration. It’s a place of unbounded learning and development, not unbounded dysfunction, conniving, and malice.

In a typically developing child, mistakes, conflicts, and even random tantrums come from naiveté, exploration of boundaries, and the reality of yet-to-be-developed parts of their brains that drive things like executive decision making and management of emotions. I struggle with these things every day as a parent, but I recognize that my kids’ lack of logic and decision-making is normal, natural, and why they need consistent, loving parents and other caring adults around them. At the end of the day, they are doing their job developing and I just have to keep doing mine in guiding, loving, and supporting them unconditionally.

We should never confuse this process and generally healthy dynamic with what we see happening in our White House, in our country, our boardrooms, or anywhere else. We should never associate genuinely childlike behavior like tantrums or grabbing someone else’s toy with the actions of adults who persistently lash out irrationally, don’t understand basic relational norms and constructs foundational to a society, and who use their position and power to manipulate and disempower others. In adults, this is not naiveté; it’s perversion. It’s not exploration; it’s intention. It’s not about their limited brain development; it’s about the rest of us accepting and normalizing bad behavior because of someone’s money or position or race. None of this is child-like. It is sick.

At the root of the illness is privilege, which not only has the ability to arrest basic social development in the child of privilege but also can persist to embolden and empower that lack of development as a source of ignorant, coercive, bully power in adulthood. The other privileged of us not directly impacted by their malevolence only feed and strengthen it through direct support or inaction.

I don’t know what to do at this point except try to do the little things every day to keep finding a place to move my next foot forward.

So, today, let’s take some power back, take a step forward, and reclaim our language not only in fairness to our children but also to clarify the real issues we are facing.

Donald Trump is not a petulant child in an adult daycare. He’s a sick adult. It’s different.

​We all know the story about change: it’s the only constant, it’s happening faster than ever, if we don’t like it then we will like being obsolete even less.

It’s all true. But, most of us and most of our companies haven’t really internalized the implications. If any of these thoughts on change are to be meaningful, we best change the way we approach this not-so-new world order, not merely acknowledge that it exists. We have to change ourselves.

I was working with a company recently who as part of their work operates call centers to provide direct support to their customers. As we talked about growth and change in their company more broadly, we explored if and how they were, or could be, learning from these front-line employees. What were they hearing directly from customers that the company really needed to understand?

We’ve all heard the saying about the importance of having “our ear to the ground” so we can sense imminent changes in our work environments and markets. Who has their ears to the ground more than those meeting our customers where they are? Dealing with their problems? Frustrations?

Too many of our people on the front-lines of our work think they are too “low on the totem pole” to speak up in our organizations or don’t have the power to create change in their own work. As a result, many of our organizations are really missing the opportunity to become more resilient, adaptable, and creative organizations. When we don’t listen to our customers and the employees who interface directly with them, we run the risk of missing indicators of emergent change in our markets, products, and even broader society that can lead our products and companies toward their next iteration.

Through our discussion, this company realized that their listening to front-line employees was spottier than they would like - that the value of listening to employees was more ad hoc and leader-by-leader than a consistent, strategic value of the firm. The implications from this kind of organizational self-awareness are pretty vast.

How do we as an organization demonstrate listening as a value? How do we train our people and set management expectations? How do we hire and promote our people to support such a strategic value? How do we intentionally recognize good listening as good leadership? How do we openly celebrate the knowledge that our people at all levels are stepping up and sharing with us?

People at all levels of our companies need formal and informal outlets to provide feedback, ask questions, and share ideas for solutions. This is just strategically smart. It’s not merely about being nice to our employees. Not only will listening to our employees make our company more resilient and adaptive, it will also make for happier employees and better products and services. When they know their ideas and insights are respected (even if not always acted upon), our people will more actively identify customer patterns and frequent issues that we may never see, and solve them in ways we may never have thought of. They will own their work.

So, instilling a culture of listening that is supported by training, accountability, and processes up and down our organization is paramount to leading emergent change –the change we otherwise may not see coming.

]]>Tue, 03 Oct 2017 22:10:05 GMThttp://www.andersonwwilliams.com/blog/i-love-you-a-requiemDays like this, weeks like this, waking up and living in a world that does this: there is a part of me not very deep down that just wants to crawl in a hole. Hide away with my family. Protect them. Love them. Protect our love from a hateful world. I am still fighting through this instinct.

And, at the same time, I have been reading and writing and thinking about power and love and society. This love that I instinctively want to hide away and protect, this love I want my children to feel, this safe, isolated love – it will not help. It is powerless. Anemic. It is part of our problem. It is a defense, a denial. It separates us, and is a sign of weakness and selfishness.

My alternate instinct is to release the rage and frustration I feel about our culture’s unwillingness to think of, consider, act, and legislate with a mind toward the other, rather than just our own needs and the needs of people like us. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s having children, but I feel we as a country are more self-centered than ever before. We are citizens of an economy driven by the belief that our self-interest is what matters. We are competing with each other for scarce resources. If we get ours, somehow it will trickle down, out, or up to be the best for the collective. We will have done our part. That’s what capitalism has taught us, right? But, surely we are more than cogs in an economic system – more than economic citizens.

What about all of this flag hullabaloo? There’s a broad war of social values and ideals being waged but in the narrowest possible way because we no longer know ourselves as part of a society. We talk about Democracy and try to build it with an economy, not by practicing democracy and building it with a society.

I see it in curt interactions among neighbors on the sidewalk all the way up to the person in the White House. We want what we want. And, if you don’t want it, then fuck you. You’re wrong. I’ll get mine, and don’t try to stop me.

Our social bonds and identities have become so weak that we see codified rights and laws as the guidelines for society rather than the safety net that will allow all of us in a society to thrive and provide the opportunity for us to be our best selves. The law defines the basest form of ourselves that a society can tolerate and remain in tact. We believe we have a right, therefore we must. It’s not prevented by law, therefore, we should. If our neighborhoods and communities feel weak, this is why. It’s because they are. The social bonds have given way to economic and legal ones.

I am starting to rage.

So, now I am back at love, but not the love I want to hide away and protect. I need to find a love that has power. Efficacy. Purpose. A love that is generative and potent.

How do we empower love rather than protect it? How do we cultivate empathy that builds a society? How do we teach and learn that the needs and feelings and perspectives of others matter even as I have a right to my own? How do we teach our children that sacrificing of one’s own self is not weakness, it is strength? That the other is part of us? How do we teach and learn that love is power and the ultimate power is love?

We are missing something, people. We are missing basic human connection. We are missing decency and personal sacrifice. We have sold our souls to ourselves. We are consumers of our own propaganda, and we’ve lost contact with each other and with something more powerful.

I have not written myself into any answer or sense of clarity here. I am lost.

So, I will just come back to the words I wrote in reaction to a previous gun tragedy in Dallas, hoping I could empower, rather than protect, love so that others might also:

Dear People,

I love you.

I love you because today I feel lost and powerless and I need to love you. I love you because I need love this morning and it’s the only light I can see.

I love you because whoever you are and wherever you are and whatever you look like, you have within you the power to help heal this world, to help heal me or the other person next door crying through his morning coffee, holding his kids a little longer and tighter, attempting to drive to work through bleary eyes.

I love you because people I don’t know and cannot tell are hurting and need someone to love them.

I love you for the implicit value of love to our common humanity, to the common life force among us. Only love allows us to share this humanity and not hold it within, isolated, alone. Love connects us, opens us to each other.

I love you for your implicit value.

I love you because only love can create the world I want to live in, to raise my daughters in.

All I hear in my head this morning repeating over and over again are Dr. King’s words: “Darkness cannot drown out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drown out hate; only love can do that.”

In the spirit and hope of sharing some tiny light this morning to drown out darkness, spreading love to drown out hate: I love you.

​Change isn’t what it used to be, neither are our organizations nor the environments in which we work and compete.

Change is no longer a discreet organizational development concept: what are the structures, policies, and practices that need changing (mostly from the top) to accomplish our business goals?

Change is emergent: how do we systematically identify the needs, gather the insights, and prepare and empower our people at all levels to make it happen? Emergent change and our ability to respond to it must be cultivated as part of our cultures, core to the people we recruit and hire, intrinsic to how we develop and support our existing people, and strategically aligned with our business model.

Despite this reality, it seems that most of the “best-selling” approaches for leading or managing change make the concept seem formulaic and finite rather than dynamic and perpetual. They make it seem organizational rather than relational. Even as many of these models readily identify change as the only constant in our contemporary business environment, they often present solutions as if it were time bound and discreet.

One of the most popular is the Kotter Change Model, which defines an 8-step process for leading successful change: 1. Create a sense of urgency. 2. Build a powerful coalition. 3. Create a vision for change. 4. Communicate the vision. 5. Empower action by removing barriers. 6. Generate short-term wins. 7. Build on the change. 8. Make it stick.

I don’t actually disagree with any of this and totally understand how such a list makes a powerful product for those who are struggling to lead change. I wonder, however, if those struggling the most to lead change aren’t often the ones who need a deeper understanding of it. Yes, in most cases, you will need to take Kotter’s steps to achieve the change you want, but is that all it takes? I don’t think so.

You know what will kill your change process before you ever take that first step? 1. A lack of trust in leadership. 2. Poor relationships with and among our people. 3. Ineffective communication from the highest level of values and vision down to day-to-day operations.

Let’s consider some basic questions:

Can a leader who isn’t trusted by his people create a shared sense of urgency with them?

Can a leader with poor relationship skills or who doesn’t prioritize relationships build powerful coalitions?

Can a leader who doesn’t communicate effectively generate buy-in for a sustainable vision of change?

I think for most of us the answer is at least “not likely” for all of these – which undermines the first four steps in the 8-step change process!

So, while I appreciate the concise steps for change provided by Kotter’s model and others that are equally consumable, they mostly represent the tactical investments that live on the tail end of any real change process. They ignore foundational concepts of readiness. If I might adapt the old adage: “Change is 90% preparation, 10% perspiration.”

The 8-steps are mostly the perspiration.

As leaders, we have to be mindful every day and in every interaction of what kind of organization we are building. We have to understand our power to engage and influence our people, to share power with them, and to prepare them to help lead and navigate change with us. We must work daily to generate energy and ownership of our vision, strategies, and work with others.

As leaders, we have to be willing to do the immeasurable and un-measureable work of building trust, modeling strong relationships, and investing in culture. If we do this work, we, and our organizations, will be ready for change as it comes. It will just be part of how we do business.

Power is at the core of your organizational culture whether or not you accept or even recognize it. In fact, if you don’t accept or recognize it, it’s likely that you are the one benefiting from it. You’re “in power.”

Regardless of whether you do or not, I promise that others see it, and they see you through it.

So, the question is: are you the facilitator of a powerful culture or are you progenitor of a culture of power? Understanding the difference and how your people interpret your culture, and your position as a leader in it, will determine the nature and effectiveness (or not) of your leadership over the long term.

Here are a few distinctions that might help clarify:

A powerful culture believes in its people.A culture of power believes in the system, structure, and organization.

A powerful culture grows power.A culture of power consolidates and organizes it.

A powerful culture believes that knowledge and ideas are everywhere in your organization.A culture of power believes that knowledge and ideas come from the top.

A powerful culture celebrates people at all levels.A culture of power celebrates a select few.

A powerful culture focuses on relationships, responsibility, and accountability.A culture of power focuses on accountability.

A powerful culture seeks transparency.A culture of power keeps secrets.

A powerful culture communicates.A culture of power distributes information.

In a powerful culture, our people feel a sense of ownership for their work.In a culture of power, work feels directive and even compulsory.

In a powerful culture, there is joy.In a culture of power, there is fear.

In a powerful culture, everyone feels responsible for leading and following.In a culture of power, there are a few leaders and many followers.

In a powerful culture, everyone teaches and learns.In a culture of power, some are teachers and others are learners.

In a powerful culture, leadership is emergent.In a culture of power, leadership is constructed.

In a powerful culture, change is both bottom-up and top-down.In a culture of power, change is top-down.

In a powerful culture, people naturally create.In a culture of power, people wait for others “above them” to create.

In a powerful culture, people are proactive.In a culture of power, people are reactive.

In a powerful culture, people seek truth.In a culture of power, people seek affirmation.

I love this question, and I believe starting with it can open a world of possibility around addressing the most pressing issues, big and small, personal and public, work and life that we face each day. Here are some thoughts on how to release its implicit power:

HOWAssume possibility. If we genuinely and openly explore “how,” we have the opportunity to both better understand the problem we are facing and to open the door to new solutions. We have to start from a place of faith and confidence in possibility. In turn, solution thinking done well also asks us to think critically about the rules and norms of the problem, the structure. We must analyze and understand better how we arrived at the present to deepen our understanding of how we might address it, not just incrementally, but substantively in the future.

Focus on strategy. To identify “how” substantively, we need to think strategically. When we try to solve problems by starting with what we should “do” then we miss the opportunity to transform the condition that generated the problem in the first place. We end up doing stuff that just gets us to the next iteration of the same problem. Strategy focuses on systems and structures and relationships that we must invest in in order to implement our transformative “how” more consistently, sustainably, and transformationally.

Align tactics. Clearly, at some point, we must “do” something. We just shouldn’t start there because our tactics are often rooted in the skills and perspectives and practices we are most familiar with, the ways we already “do.” It doesn’t take a big leap of logic to see that those ways aren’t going to be sufficient for transforming our problem. In fact, they may be part of it. While our existing skills, perspectives, and practices may be reinvested in or reorganized for incremental improvements, to transform conditions our tactics have to be rethought and reconsidered to align directly with our strategies. We need to “do” things differently, and to make that happen we will probably also need some new skills, perspectives, and practices in the mix.

MIGHTQuestion creatively. Genuine belief in possibility begs us to be more creative. Creativity that can support the vastness of possibility starts with a willingness to question everything. This questioning isn’t about throwing out everything and starting over. In fact, it allows us the opportunity to identify and strengthen the core beliefs, the foundations upon which our work and relationships are built, the things we can’t and won’t change. At the same time, deep, creative questioning does allow us to identify ancillary assumptions about “how we do things” that, in fact, are just a matter of bad habit, culture, or climate issues. They might even live only at the small group or even individual levels of our organization or work but deeply impact our ability to accomplish our goals.

Generate lots of solutions: Similar to our urgent need to “do” something, when we start generating solutions, we often have an urgent need to get to the “right” one as quickly as possible. Getting to the right answer, however, usually requires some combination of multiple creative answers. So, we need to generate a lot of possible answers, and some that even seem impossible, before we start whittling things down. The pressure of generating a volume of ideas (in the next five minutes brainstorm some ideas vs. in the next five minutes come up with 20 ideas) forces us to move our thinking beyond our normal parameters. We force ourselves to come up with outlandish ideas – which may just hold the nugget of wisdom that triggers the ultimate solution. It also just generally gets us out of our cognitive lane and frees our thinking.

Iterate. As we start to focus our creative ideas and narrow them down, we need to stay aware of when and how we start to get wedded to them and start building assumptions around them. As we feel that human need to get to the answer, we can inadvertently make the jump to what we believe it is and derail the creative process. We must remain open and flexible and continue to iterate on ideas rather than just carry them forward. In other words, we have to keep learning. Have we uncovered some new truth that changes our assumptions? Have we identified alternative strategies and tactics and are we staying open to those as they come? What are their implications on our previous strategies or tactics? Basically, we have to remain committed to creatively questioning throughout the process.

WEEngage diverse voices and ideas. To support the generation of lots of solutions, we should also engage diverse voices and perspectives. Generating a lot of the same kind of ideas from the same perspectives doesn’t get us anywhere. But, when we stop and engage stakeholders, and even non-stakeholders, in the ideation process, we generate more raw material to work with, and often material we never thought about, blinded by our own perspectives.

Develop shared purpose. Even though it is the last word in the question, solving for “how might we” starts with the idea of “we.” It’s the subject. It’s collective. We work with and through others. To solve the problems we need to solve and create the future we want to create, we must share a sense of purpose of what we are trying to accomplish. None of the other parts of this process will work fluidly if our purposes are not aligned. The process of creating is hard enough without facing the constant and unnamable stress and frustration of inadvertently working at cross-purposes. This is perhaps the most critical investment a leader can make.

Share responsibility and accountability. When we are trying to transform our work and/or the world, we must not just share purpose but ownership. “We” works at all levels of our creative process and related attempts at implementing new strategies and tactics. So, we must be intentional over time as we continue to ideate, iterate, and implement any change efforts, so that a sense of the collective remains. We will divvy up specific responsibilities, different people deploy different tactics, but we should continue to share accountability for achieving our strategy, driving toward our shared purpose throughout the creative process.